What is marketing automation software?

Marketing Automation Is an umbrella term for tools that allow businesses to manage their multiple channels (social media, SMS, etc.) from a single platform. Marketing automation tracks all your interactions with subscribers and not just the activity on email messages. By implementing advanced marketing automation systems you can better manage marketing campaigns automatically, across numerous channels such as email, web, and social media. This is accomplished via automated workflows which are able to send messages according to a set of instructions. With an advanced marketing automation platform, you can create these automated workflows using special “templates” provided to you within the platform.

So with that being said, marketing automation automates online campaigns and sales activities in the marketing and sales team to maximise efficiency and increase revenue. When used effectively to handle repetitive tasks, employees are free to tackle higher-order problems, and human error is reduced.

This process is what helps generate engaged leads, nurtures them, and scores them, as well as to measure campaign ROI. With the increasing size and complexity of an organisation, automation produces more time- and cost-saving effects which is why so many large corporations and SMB’s implement these practices.

Compare The Best Marketing Automation Software

What to look for in SMB or enterprise marketing automation software

Marketing automation software for SMB’s

For the most part when it comes to marketing automation software most small businesses are looking to automate marketing tasks, build landing pages, track email campaigns, and manage social media. Fortunately, many vendors cater to these needs and allow customers to select the features they need. Let me share with you my favorite options for SMB companies.

Builderall is an excellent example of marketing automation software for small businesses. This system was designed with the needs of SMB companies in mind. For small businesses, 2000 subscribers should be enough. Builderalls email automation capabilities are very powerful and include ready-made templates. Besides sending automated emails, the program also offers contact management functionality. It’s basically a built-in CRM tool.

Use marketing automation software for enterprise businesses that integrate all marketing channels

Automating content is the first step in marketing automation. It is essential to ensure that your content strategy is aligned with your personas. Without this, you will have a difficult time delivering the right message to your audience. This is why marketing and automation are intimately linked. Once your content is properly tailored to your personas, you’ll be able to hand off qualified leads to your sales team. There are several other benefits of automating the marketing process

This can be done through dynamic, relevant content. The information you provide is relevant to the lead, which will lead them to purchase your product or service. Moreover, your personalised campaigns should be customised to each lead’s needs and interests to ensure a personalised experience. This is a good way to increase conversion rates and retain customers. Adaptive content changes according to the lead’s behaviour, which makes it more believable.

With built-in features, Builderalls Marketing Automation software for enterprise businesses can integrate all marketing channels, including social media and dedicated email platforms. It tracks multiple simultaneous schedules and reports on the effectiveness of every marketing activity. The software also records every customer interaction. Each time a customer engages with a brand touch point, their profile updates. The analytic reports detail each customer’s journey through the brand. The goal is to create a seamless experience for each customer and increase their lifetime value, this greatly increases the customer experience for enterprise businesses.

Choosing the right marketing automation software

When choosing a marketing automation tool, consider the number of marketing channels you plan to use. If you’re a small business, it may not make much sense to invest in a multi-channel system. If you’re a larger company, you may need to upgrade to a more advanced tool. In this case, map your campaigns and decide which channels you’ll need. Once you’ve identified the best channels to use, choose the appropriate software.

Regardless of your business size, marketing automation software comes with a variety of features. When selecting a platform, keep in mind your needs. You can find a solution that’s compatible with your current technology and offers features that meet your business’ needs. Moreover, a platform with native integrations will help you connect data from different systems. Open-ended APIs are also important when choosing a marketing automation tool.

The Best Marketing Automation Software For 2022

Marketing Automation Software Benefits & Return On Investment

1) Achieve a competitive advantage: Automate repetitive tasks like email marketing allows marketers to create multiple and highly relevant messages and deliver them at scale using multiple channels to gain an advantage over their competitors.

2) Generate better leads: Streamline the lead generation process with a marketing automation software platform to manage your demand generation efforts across multiple channels or stages of the customer journey more effectively, resulting in a higher quality lead funnel. This includes personalizing messages for each customer segment and at each stage of their journey.

3) Enhance customer engagement:   Make it easier to engage with your customers by leveraging marketing automation software to send relevant messages through the right channel at the right time.

4) Increase productivity: Work smarter not harder using marketing automation software that makes marketers more productive, efficient and effective by automating their day-to-day tasks so they can focus on more value-added activities. For example, marketing automation software can automate your email marketing efforts by pulling in data from other systems to create relevant messages that are then distributed through the right channel at the right time.

What is an ideal customer experience that businesses seek to create?

Let’s step back and reflect on that question, as it is proven that a brand that provides an excellent service and solves a customer’s pain points will increase its customer base and be better apt at turning leads into customers. Who are your ideal customers? The ideal customers has a strong relationship with a brand, and they’re likely to recommend it to their friends and family.

With that being said, lets dive into the expierence your ideal customer should have. To start, the ideal customer experience can be described as the sum of a customer’s interactions with a business. Depending on the context, a customer’s ideal experience can vary greatly. The goal is to make a consumer feel special – that they’re more than just another transaction. A customer is an integral part of the business journey – one who allows the organization to pursue its mission. Creating an ideal user experience is essential for every business to turn leads to customers, so start by defining what an exceptional potential client looks like.

For most businesses an exceptional client or customer has a great emotional connection with the brand, which makes emotional attachment the first component of a great customer experience. According to research, half of all customer experiences are based on emotions. The emotional connection is the memory of an event, and it drives decisions. Likewise, consumers become loyal shoppers based on emotion. If a brand is able to create this bond, the company’s profits will be higher than it would be if it were unable to offer the product. So knowing this information lets tie this back to marketing automation as we can create these customer experiences by leveraging email marketing automation.

How marketing automation applies to email marketing

Email marketing is an essential component of marketing automation vendors. With this you can send mass emails to segmented audiences.

Most all-in-one marketing automation platforms have the capability to send targeted email messages to prospects, and loyal customers who engage with there products, such as downloading content or filling out forms. This is how you create a better customer expierence, by providing content to those who take interest in certain areas of your business only and not to everyone. With this practice you build trust and a better overall expierence.

Next, it is important to choose a provider that utlizes segmentation and batch send emails. Most email marketing automation vendors offer a base level feature that allows users to send mass emails to segments of customers. If you use these functions to send targeted and segmented emails, it makes your marketing more personal. Trust is built by segmenting your prospects, and communicating with them in a way relevant to their needs. Segmentation is most often seen in the marketing department, which uses targeted email campaigns to reach specific audiences. The main aim is to increase conversion rates and customer loyalty by sending ‘highly personalised’ messages based on a user’s known interests and past behaviour. For example, a lead scoring system that identifies a high-value target will automatically put that prospect into Segment A, whereas a low-value target will fall into Segment B or C. This automation makes the entire process more efficient compared to if the segment were chosen manually.

This next feature applies if prospects take an action on your website, such as downloading content or filling out forms, a behavioural trigger email will send them targeted content

Your audience will feel reassured by follow-up emails. They can confirm that your organisation has received their action and are in the process to respond 49% don’t use automatic email triggers in their marketing tools and platforms. This gives them a competitive edge.

Email personalization can come in many different forms. There are several ways to engage the reader by including their name or other relevant information into your email that makes it more personable. You can also engage them by using humour or wit. For example in your email include the customer’s name and refer to a recent purchase they might have made.

Using dynamic personalization, you can choose the relevant information from your customers who prefer not to receive promotional emails with irrelevant personalised content. A mass email, on the customer’s file to include in the email. Then, your marketing automation system. They takes care of pulling that data and constructing a personalised message to send to each recipient. In this way, you don’t need to manually prepare personalised emails every time as it is automated.

Email marketing is a great way to get your message out to the masses, but even with all of its benefits, it can be hard to measure results on a large scale. That’s why A/B testing is so popular. It helps you focus your efforts and test ideas for better email campaign performance. Used by companies like Amazon and Uber, A/B testing is a form of statistics that compares two versions of a campaign or product to see which one performs better. Drip campaigns are the main way to nurture new leads that enter your funnel towards a sale via email. They send content to prospects to build brand awareness, trust, and provide timely content. You can set up drip campaigns by selecting the content that moves leads through the funnel. The drip campaign will then send the content to the lead based upon time, lead actions or other triggers. Many companies create a welcome sequence for those who sign up to their contact list. The best drip campaigns follow a logical sequence from one action to another. Did your prospect download content assets from your website? Next, follow-up with a offer about this product or more information about the technology. Most drip campaigns are sent via email. However, many modern MA tools can be integrated with social media.

How marketing automation applies to social media management

Social media management tools (MA software) let you schedule posts to various social media platforms, monitor your feeds for new mentions and/or conversations, and track performance metrics, such as the number of engagements received from each post.

In addition, they often provide analytics displays featuring information like how many times a given post was shared with others, or who shared it with whom. This makes them very valuable resources for social marketers, as they can help you to determine what types of content perform best, and plan investments in the future accordingly.

In addition to all this, some tools – including SocialBee feature built-in data analytics displays which show how your accounts are performing across multiple social media platforms. This helps you remain aware of important metrics like engagement rates and follower growth so that you have a better idea of how your campaigns are coming along. With this information at hand, you’ll be able to calculate projected return on investment (ROI) as well as adjust future strategies as needed.

Further benefits include being able to schedule posts in advance and monitor what your audience is posting across social media sites. You can then engage with these conversations immediately or use this information to guide future content creation. Other tools allow you to engage directly with followers, share their content, and follow new users within the same interface.

If you’re looking for a great social media management tool with built-in analytics displays, SocialBee is an option worth considering.

Social listening tools are one of the best ways to follow along in social media conversations about your brand, products, services, and competitors. When you begin looking for these types of tools, here’s what to look for:

How much information do they pull in? You want a service that brings in a wide range of information, but something that pulls in a lot more than you could ever look through isn’t going to be useful.

What level of access can you have? Most social listening tools give you full access to the data they pull in, but others limit it to read only. You’ll want to make sure your tool allows you to contribute to the conversation, if possible.

What’s their customer support like? If you aren’t sure how something works and need help, there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to contact a service only to be ignored or handed an automated response. Having good customer service can make or break your experience with social listening services

Social interactions through media messaging technologies

Social listening tools are necessary, but they only answer the “what” of your social media monitoring. It’s important to also know who is saying what, and how you should respond.

Once you’ve identified key influencers in your industry, it’s time to dive into these people’s conversations on social media. Enter: messaging.

You’ll need a social media marketing automation tool to create a presence with influencers in your industry. From there, it’s time to start engaging with them through messaging…

Twitter/Facebook/Whatsapp direct messages are an integral part of streamlining customer service and gaining new insights from top customers. It may be surprising how often you can get actionable feedback from your biggest fans.

how marketing automation applies to marketing analytics

If you desire to know how your marketing campaign is faring and where you are being most successful, then it’s time to get in-depth marketing analytics. Although it might sound quite complex, in-depth analytics simply means monitoring the statistics of your marketing activity.

Most companies analyse their website traffic through Google Analytics (because it’s free and powerful) or another on-site analytics tool. Make sure your MA software can integrate with your website analytics tool, so you can see all of your website traffic information in a single place. Integrated website analytics tools will let you see the full scope of your digital marketing analytics and how your campaigns affect your website traffic, conversions, and ultimately the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing activity.

Integrating your CRM with your marketing automation tool

Before we talk about integrating the two, lets talk about how they first differ in order for you to paint a clear picture in your mind. The main difference between CRM software and marketing automation software is that CRM software is used primarily for sales purposes and marketing automation is used mostly for marketing.

Integrating your CRM and marketing automation software can increase your business’s capabilities and improve the customer experience.

Marketing Automation:

-Routes qualified traffic to a lead form

-Reports on the number of form submissions and traffic sources for each campaign

-Sends out triggered emails based on user actions

-Provides detailed analytics around email click rates, open rates, etc. (who opened your email, which link they clicked)

CRM Software:

-Manages pipelines to track sales opportunities

-Tracks all your contacts and customer communications in one place

-Helps you schedule, deliver, and follow up on email campaigns (compared to marketing automation software)

-Provides detailed contact profiles for lead generation (demographics, psychographics, etc.)

-Integrates with other software like Google Analytics to provide valuable insights

-Records all interactions with your customers so you can see the history of past conversations

-Allows you to track important data like how frequently customers are buying, what they’re buying, and any problems they might be having that you need to know about

Overall, integrating CRM software and marketing automation software can improve your business’s capabilities by allowing you to track all interactions with customers, automate email campaigns, and deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time.

Email marketing vs marketing automation

Marketing Automation Is an umbrella term for tools that allow businesses to manage their multiple channels (social media, SMS, etc.) from a single platform. Email marketing consists of sending a series of emails to target customers who have specifically opted-in for subscriptions. Marketing automation tracks all your interactions with subscribers and not just the activity on email messages.

In terms of costs, marketing automation can be expensive at times depending on how many tools you need and which ones you want to integrate. On the other hand, email marketing is inexpensive and easy to do — you only need an email platform and a list of subscribers that you can get for free or at very minimal costs.

While emails are still one of the top ways marketers communicate with their customers, they shouldn’t rely solely on them since these messages are easy to ignore. With marketing automation, you can engage your audience more through multiple channels, both online and offline

Conclusion

All types and sizes of businesses can benefit from marketing automation products. Therefore, modern entrepreneurs must jump on the bandwagon and explore all available tools for automation to truly streamline their businesses.

Before launching automated marketing campaigns, take the time to assess your specific requirements, available resources, and business goals. This is due to the fact that in order to craft the most well defined marketing automation strategy you need to pull all of your customer data together to make the customer journey something that the user will engage with and ultimately buy from you and trust you.